Our Project Team
Meet the team of scholars behind the Freedom Seekers Project
Antonio T. Bly
Antonio T. Bly is the Peter H. Shattuck Endowed Chair at California State University, Sacramento. He is a book historian whose work explores the intersection of history, memory, historical imagination, and print culture. His recent work, Escaping Matrimony, documents eloping advertisements that appeared in colonial newspapers before the American Revolution.
Simon P. Newman
Simon P. Newman is Sir Denis Brogan Professor of History (Emeritus) at the University of Glasgow, and an honorary fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is a historian of the social history of early modern British America, with a particular focus on slavery and resistance to enslavement by escape. He is the author of Freedom Seekers: Escaping from Slavery in Restoration London (2022), the joint winner of the 2023 Frederick Douglass Book Prize.
Billy G. Smith
Billy G. Smith is Emeritus Malone Professor of History and Distinguished Professor of Letters & Science at Montana State University. For the past four decades, he has studied class, poverty, working humans, women, enslaved people, urban spaces, and disease in early America and the Atlantic World.
Gloria Whiting
Gloria McCahon Whiting is E. Gordon Fox Assistant Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is a social historian of early America with interests in the history of slavery and race as well as women, gender, and family. Her first book is Belonging: An Intimate History of Slavery and Family in Early New England (2024).
Isaac Lee
Isaac Lee is the Project Assistant for Freedom Seekers. He is a Ph.D. Candidate in the UW-Madison History Department with interests in local government, slavery, and colonialism in the early modern Atlantic world.